Warbands, Collecting, Musings, Discussions and Thoughts about DDM 1.0

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D&D Miniatures – Collectible Thoughts and Ease of Acquisition by Set

So I may not have enough information to make any heavy generalizations about how hard it is to acquire minis of a particular set, I am going to do so anyway. It’s just how I roll.

So far, I’ve purchased and traded for around 3,200 minis, and resold or traded about 500 of those. Based on this small statistical sample, I will say that it is currently harder to acquire Archfiends and Giants of Legend minis than it is Harbinger and Dragoneye. What I mean by that is while I have seen quite a lot of the first and third set on the market on eBay (both in lots and sets), I have yet to see a large lot of Archfiends or GoL. It was this way back when I was playing 5 years ago as well, more so for Archfiends, as I remember buying a GoL case and cracking it, and picking up quite a few GoL off eBay. I purchased a 240 mini lot last week that was entirely Harbinger and Dragoneye (About 70% Harbinger), and many of the other lots I’ve purchased also contain miniatures from those two sets, with far fewer from the set in between.

Currently I’m well on my way to completing a Harbinger set (I have 11 of the 27 rares, including 3 Drow Cleric of Lolth, 2 of which I hope to trade for several of the missing ones). I have fewer than half that in Archfiends rares, though I picked up my first-ever Champion of Eilistraee this week. I don’t think there is any denying that while Harbinger has collectible value for age, the figures in general improved quite a bit in the next set, especially in the paint process. It’s my guess that this is the reason there are fewer Archfiends coming on the market. Plus, while Harbinger had a couple of chase rares, it also had a lot of ‘bleh’ non-unique rares like the Troll, Mummy and Medusa. Archfiends introduced two of the most sought-after pieces in the game (Drizzt and Champion) as well as having several great demons/devils and the first dragon.

I would love for Wizards to publish the print run size of each of the sets, just for historical purposes, as I am fascinated by the statistics of DDM. It would also make it easier to attribute more of the costing that goes into the price of each piece on the secondary market, ie. How much is the fig quality, how much the paint, how much the size of the print run, usability in the RPG etc.

Coming Soon: Tomorrow I’m going to post my initial thoughts on converting Pathfinder to DDM 1.0…let me say, it’s turning out to be harder than I thought! I was going to do D&D 3.5 to DDM as I already had the books, but because I’ve heard that Pathfinder is basically 3.5 improved, I figured I would start there. My goal is to run Shackled City (a Pathfinder Adventure Path) as the first test of the conversion, and to improve upon it over additional Adventure Paths.

Dragoneye wasactually the second set and Archfiends the third, but you are totally right, Archfiends is quite expesive in comparison and back un the 2007 and before Drizzt was the most expensive miniature.

Oops, thanks for the correction, total brain cramp there!=) It’s interesting as Dragoneye is to this day one of the cheapest sets available…the last 2 on eBay went for $200, which is lower than every set I’ve seen except War Drums.